Bruins: There's no defense

The Boston Bruins find themselves in the awkward position of trying to put into a proper perspective Wednesday night's deflating, 3-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens in Game 7 of their second-round playoff series.

The Boston Bruins find themselves in the awkward position of trying to put into a proper perspective Wednesday night's deflating, 3-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens in Game 7 of their second-round playoff series.

This wasn't like last year when the Bruins felt they had left it all on the ice and lost to an even bigger juggernaut in the Chicago Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup finals

As competitors and professionals, the defeat to Montreal is harder to bear and not only because of who beat them. There is a strong sense of regret with a capacity to haunt the summer vacation that starts now.

"Yeah, it's going to be a while, especially when you know that you have a team that was so good and consistent throughout the whole season, and you have a good enough team to win more than one series," said captain Zdeno Chara some 10 minutes after congratulating the underdogs. "For sure it's something that you're going to be thinking about."

Unless their glove gets stuck while celebrating a series-changing goal in an enemy rink, hockey players tend not to point the finger.

From Chara on down, the Bruins feel like they should be the team hosting the New York Rangers in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final on Saturday, not Montreal. So they have to square that up with their best pole-to-pole campaign (54-19-9 — 117 points) of the nine-season, salary-cap era, and their best since the glory days of Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and company.

This morning at TD Garden, players will try to make sense of it when they meet for their exit interviews.

But maybe the question shouldn't be what the heck happened on Wednesday? It should be what the heck happened that allowed this team to mask its weakness for so long?

Even Las Vegas bookmakers bought in, making the Bruins favorites to take home the Stanley Cup. After six rollercoaster games against Montreal, this favoritism among oddsmakers persisted into Game 7, where Boston was favored to win big and decide it early.

The only thing that was decided early, however, was that the Bruins' not-ready-for-prime-time players weren't going to gain overnight the career seasoning that eliminates the little/big errors that plagued them against the Canadiens.

Chara and Patrice Bergeron admitted afterward that it sapped their strength to see the Canadiens once again score so early the way they had so often in the series.

Off the ice, who can blame hockey-is-religion Montreal for celebrating like its team had just beaten the 2013 — or even the 2011 — Bruins?

It goes with the territory. It's part of the rivalry, and it will live on in folklore, just like the myth that the 1973-74 Philadelphia Flyers proved to all the world that the Big, Bad Bruins of Orr and Esposito could be beaten.

Spoiler alert: It was a deteriorated Boston team that lost to Philadelphia, as the Rangers had demonstrated in fewer games the year before.

But let Montreal enjoy this like Philly enjoyed '74. The Canadiens should get to savor the spoils of victory, even through their kaleidoscope glasses.

They've suffered long enough.

After the Bruins are all talked out, general manager Peter Chiarelli and coach Claude Julien will answer questions and perhaps uncover some secrets, like whether or not we really would have seen Dennis Seidenberg in the next series had the Bruins won on Wednesday.

As it is, the No. 2 defenseman's comeback was apparently close to complete when the Bruins ran out of the rope they were feeding their younger four blueliners.

There are only so many mistakes a team can make without coercion before they catch up and determine the result.

Assuming that the Bruins re-sign Jarome Iginla, there really is not a whole lot of change coming to the core of the team beyond a Seidenberg return.

Perhaps a question might be what the rationale was behind TD Garden's music selection of Smashing Pumpkins' song "1979?" If '79 wasn't rock bottom, it certainly wasn't the best year of the rivalry's history from a Boston perspective.

Ironically, the song played and the Bruins did not have too many men on the ice. With kids all over their blue line, the problem was they didn't have enough.

Mick Colageo writes for The Standard-Times. Contact him at mcolageo@s-t.com.